Rove becomes Tea Party target but doubles down on critique of O’Donnell

Moments after Christine O’Donnell finished her victory speech Tuesday night in Dover, Del., she invited a state Tea Party leader on stage to speak. The activist promptly extended an unmistakable rhetorical middle finger to the Republican leader who has overnight become a symbol for the hated GOP establishment: Karl Rove.

Rove, the former Bush White House political adviser who still plays a major role in GOP politics, had come to Delaware a year before to ask the Tea Party activists in Delaware to support Republican Rep. Mike Castle for the Senate seat.

Russ Murphy, the executive director of the 9/12 Delaware Patriots, stood onstage next to O’Donnell and described the meeting.

“I interrupted Mr. Rove and I said, ‘Sir with all due respect, we won’t endorse the party,'” Murphy said.

“He said, ‘Well, what I really want to do is tell you folks how to work with the candidate and how to get things done.'”

“And I said, ‘Sir, with all due respect,'” and here Murphy lowered his voice for emphasis, “‘No one is going to tell us how to take care of business.’”

The crowd cheered lustily.

Murphy’s comments were prompted by Rove’s interview only an hour or two earlier on Fox News with Sean Hannity, in which Rove trashed O’Donnell — “I’ve met her. I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t frankly impressed” — and said Republicans would no longer be able to win the general election.

On Wednesday, O’Donnell revived the war of words in an early morning interview on Fox News, prompting Rove to double down on his criticisms and go into even more detail about the questions surrounding O’Donnell’s past, also in an interview on Fox.

Rove’s comments on Wednesday drew a rebuke – again, on Fox – from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who endorsed O’Donnell a few days before Tuesday’s primary.

“Well, bless his heart. We love our friends, they’re in the machine, the expert politicos,” Palin said when asked about Rove’s comments. “But my message to those who say that the GOP nominee is not electable, or that they’re not even going to try, well I say, ‘Buck up!'”

“It is time to put aside internal power grabs and greed and egos within the Party and to fight united,” Palin said.

The surreal intra-party spat was topped off by the appearance of beleaguered Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele in a taped interview with CNN, where he made a plea for unity.

“How can you claim defeat before you attempt victory? This makes no sense. It makes no sense. So stop it. Stop it,” Steele said, according to a transcript e-mailed to reporters.

“It wouldn’t be prudent of me either to get into a tussle with Karl Rove … but what the heck, let’s go ahead and do it,” Palin said with a smile. “Some of these good old boys – and I have nothing against Karl Rove personally, you know he’s the expert – but Bill, some of these folks they are saying that people like Christine O’Donnell and others, Tea Party Americans, can’t win because they don’t want them to win, because they know that … these folks are gonna shake it up.”

“And they are going to do what’s right for America, not necessarily what is right for a political party machine,” Palin said.

In the initial Fox appearance Tuesday night that set off the chain reaction, Rove rattled off a list of questions about O’Donnell’s “checkered background,” and made clear he felt the candidate was almost entirely discredited and perhaps not entirely genuine.

“It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and characters that voters are looking for,” Rove said. “We’ll see how she can answer these questions. She sure as heck didn’t answer them thus far on the campaign.”